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Salam alaikum brother!
Me and my brother used to be the cyber worriers on the net back then, always talking on the Sunni Shi’a wars (cyber wars lol) 2003 it was i remember.
My posts are still there and my brothers
I was 16, at college we were all excited back then when we came to know about shiachat (2003). God! It’s been soo long! Around then I remember shiachat introduced the ‘chat rooms’. As a typical 16 year old i took the benefit of that and used to Annoy everyone haha .. oh god lol (me laughing) and then guess what happened? Shiachat banned me from using my account. It really didnt bother me much back then but now I miss my account and my posts ..and I decided today that I need to make a new account... and here I am! 32 this year! And was 16 when i used it..

While lots of the time I agree with what rkazemi says, I have to say I’m not seeing what she sees in terms of your blog post. I don’t see you telling woman to go back to the kitchen or any of those disrespectful slogans. Not even implied.
what I see in your blog posts and responses to others is a very balanced, respectful individual. Many people on here look-up to you as inspiration as to how to be a better Muslim, and for your contributions to this forum, we greatly appreciate it and thank you.
You are definitely not a male chauvinist.

This is an extract of the teachings of Mughira to his followers the Mughiriyya [Taken from Abu Tammam’s Bab al-Shaytan of the Kitab al-Shajara, translated by Wilferd Madelung and Paul E. Walker]:
The tenth sect is the Mughiriyya related to al-Mughira b. Sa’id al-Ijli [sic. al-Bajali]. They make up one group of the anthropomorphists. The object of their worship according to them, is a [divine] man the light on whose head forms a crown and he wears garments. His loincloth is the Qur’an that was revealed to Muhammad, the messenger of God, may God bless him and his family; His robes are the Gospels that were revealed to Jesus, on whom be peace; His shirt is the Torah that was revealed to Moses, on whom be peace; and His pants are the Pslams that were revealed to David, on whom be peace. He possesses limbs and a physical constitution like that of a man and has a belly from which flows wisdom.
They claim that the letters of the alphabet agree with the number of His limbs and that each letter in it resembles one of His limbs. The alif is the position of His foot because of its curvature. The rest of the members they describe in accord with the description of these letters. They insist that al-Mughira said to his followers once when speaking of the letter ha’: if you were to see its place on Him, you would see something awesome. He was hinting at some genitalia of His and that he had seen Him [in a heavenly ascent].
The Mughiriyya claim that these letters are all a part of one name which is the greatest name of God. In addition they insist that al-Mughira was a prophet and he knew that name. With it he used to revive the dead and perform other marvels. They report that once al-Mughira passed through a cemetery with some of his followers and there in that cemetery he revived the dead and fed them fruits in mid-winter. Moreover, he displayed to them a flash of light that ran from the crown of his head to his feet; he toyed thus with his followers and bewitched their eyes with tricks of magic.
They also report that al-Mughira spoke about the beginning of creation. He said that God, the glorious and most high, was once alone and nothing was with Him. When He wished to create things, He spoke His own name. His word flew and landed over His head above the crown. Al-Mughira said that this was His statement, “Glorify the name of your Lord most high” (87:1). Then with His finger He wrote on His palm the deeds of humans that are acts of disobedience and obedience and He became angry at the acts of disobedience. His sweat overflowed and two oceans gathered from His sweat, one brackish and dark, the other pure luminous. Then looking into the ocean, He saw His shadow, so He went forth to seize it. He plucked out its two eyes and created out of them two suns and He blotted out some light from the moon. Then, out of the physical forms of His shadow, He created the heavens and the stars. Next, from these two oceans, He created creation in its entirety: from the dark brackish water, He created the shadow of the unbelievers, from the pure luminous water, He created the shadow of the believers.
The first among them that God created was Muhammad, may God bless him and his family, in accord with the statement of God, the glorious and the mighty, “Say: if the Most merciful had a son, I would be the first of the worshippers” (43:81). Next he sent Muhammad to the people altogether while they were yet shadows and He commanded him to have them bear witness on their own account of their recognition of the lordship of God, the apostleship of Muhammad, and the guardianship of Ali, on whom be peace, and that he recited His words, “When your Lord took from the tribe of Adam …” (7:172).
Then He proposed to the heavens and the earth that they should prevent Ali b. Abi Talib from assuming the caliphate and the imamate, but they refused. Next He proposed it to the mountains but they refused also. Then He proposed it to the people, whereupon Umar went to Abu Bakr – both were at that moment still shadows - and he ordered him to take upon himself the task of preventing Ali by them both betraying him. Thereafter Abu Bakr did exactly that. All this is in God’s statement, “We did indeed offer the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains but they refused to undertake it being afraid of it. But man undertook it; he was indeed unjust and foolish” (33:72) Then Umar said to Abu Bakr, “I will support you against Ali, on whom be peace, so that you can pass the caliphate to me after yourself”. That is in God’s statement, “Like Satan when he said to man, ‘disbelieve’ and when he renounced belief, he said, ‘I am free of you’” (59:16). Here the Satan is Umar and the man is Abu Bakr.
In their view, the earth will disgorge the dead and they will return to this world. The Mahdi will appear at the end of time, they say, and Gabriel and Michael will aid him between the Ruqn and the Maqam. He will choose nineteen men and give each one of them a letter of the greatest name of God and by means of it they will defeat all armies and dominate the earth.

W. Salam.
Indeed they were.
However, these words are spoken by a proto-Sunni Hadith narrator called al-A’mash. This indicates that the `Aimma and their true followers were not doing La’n openly and that Mughira betrayed Taqiyya.

Salam brother
Thank you for sharing this, very interesting to read!
Just one question regarding this statement:
"The first person I heard abusing Aba Bakr and Umar was al-Mughira b. Sa’id"
Weren't the Imams a.s speaking bad about the two themselves before Mughira l.a?

My post is focused mainly on how Western socio-political discourse occurs between two poles: (1) Freedom, and (2) Harm. This is the result of a long, crystallizing history. Islam may have areas of overlap with utilitarians and classical liberals, but overall the Islamic thesis puts God above everything else.
Regarding your point about jahiliyya: I can easily say that jahiliyya gave many freedoms to women that Islam removed. Jahiliyya had no penalties for fornicators, it had rights for prostitutes, it allowed women to marry a second husband to conceive a high-status son, it had female prophetesses, and it had female goddesses. Islam restricted all of this. Yes, Islam did give many additional rights to women, but my point is that Islam is not all about freedom and liberation. It is about accountability, responsibility, and duty. It freed some aspects of our lives, but it restricted others. Anyone who reads Islamic literature with feminist glasses will be surely disappointed.
As for your point that men in eastern culture "don't lift a finger when they are at home", that sounds like a gross generalization of billions of people and hundreds of cultures. Even if I were to concede that eastern men generally cook and clean less than their wives, they work longer hours, and a lot of the handiwork, lawn-mowing, technology fixing is done by men. Either way, it's not a competition. One shouldn't have a men vs women mindset, or even a victimized mindset. Men too are victims; they are the ones most effected by violence, suicide, work injuries, drugs, prisons, gangs, and dropping out of school... a victim mentality however would not solve these problems.
Islam = Submission in Arabic, it's not submission to men, it's submission to Allah. Submission in some cases will be the opposite of freedom, but I would argue that sincere submission to Allah frees you from your fears and your desires, and leads to a good and contented life.
I never said women should be slaves to men, or that womanhood is a disadvantage, or being dark-skinned (?) is bad. Men and women are simply different and have different rights and responsibilities in Islam. Islam is a sexually dimorphic religion. Women don't pay mahr, they don't pray/fast during their time of the month, they are not conscripted in wartime, they don't need to work, they don't need to divide their wealth, etc. By the same token, women have some unique laws and responsibilities. Total freedom and equality means removing every gendered law, including the ones that restrict men and free women, and vice versa. This is antithetical to our revelation.
Please don't call me dishonest or a male chauvinist just because of one respectful criticism of modern feminism. That type of spiteful namecalling won't get you much sympathy from a neutral reader. State your arguments respectfully.

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[This will be a series of blog entries on the history of ShiaChat.com; how it was founded, major ups and down, politics and issues behind running such a site and of course, the drama! I will also provide some feedback on development efforts, new features and future goals and objectives]

Part 1 - The IRC (#Shia) Days!

Sit children, gather around and let me speak to you of tales of times before there was ever high-speed Internet, Wi-Fi, YouTube or Facebook; a time when the Internet was a much different place and 15 year old me was still trying to make sense of it all.

In the 90s, the Internet was a very different place; no social media, no video streaming and downloading an image used to take anywhere from 5-10 minutes depending on how fast your 14.4k monster-sized dial up modem was. Of course you also had to be lucky enough for your mom to have the common courtesy not to disconnect you when you’re in the middle of a session; that is if you were privileged enough to have Internet at home and not have to spend hours at school or libraries, or looking for AOL discs with 30 hour free trials..(Breathe... breathe... breathe) - I digress.

Back in 1998 when Google was still a little computer sitting in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s basement, I was engaged in armchair jihadi-like debates with our Sunni brothers on an IRC channel called #Shia. (Ok, a side note here for all you little pups. This is not read as Hashtag Shia, the correct way of reading this is “Channel Shia”. The “Hash tag” was a much cooler thing back in the day than the way you young’uns use it today).

For those of you who don’t know what IRC was (or is... as it still exists), it stands for Internet Relay Chat, which are servers available that you could host chat rooms in and connect through a client. It was like the Wild West where anyone can go and “found” their own channel (chat room), become an operator and reign down their god-like dictator powers upon the minions that were to join as member of their chat room. Luckily, #Shia had already been established for a few years before by a couple of brothers I met from Toronto, Canada (Hussain A. and Mohammed H.). Young and eager, I quickly rose up the ranks to become a moderator (@Ali) and the chatroom quickly became an important part of my adolescent years. I learned everything I knew from that channel and met some of the most incredible people. Needless to say, I spent hours and dedicated a good portion of my life on the chatroom; of course the alternate was school and work but that was just boring to a 15 year old.

In the 90’s, creating a website was just starting to be cool so I volunteered to create a website for #Shia to advertise our services, who we are, what we do as well as have a list of moderators and administrators that have volunteered to maintain #Shia. As a result, #Shia’s first website was hosted on a friend’s server under the URL http://786-110.co.uk/shia/ - yes, ShiaChat.com as a domain did not exist yet – was too expensive for my taste so we piggy backed on one of our member’s servers and domain name.

The channel quickly became popular, so popular that we sometimes outnumbered our nemesis, #Islam. As a result, our moderator team was growing as well and we needed a website with an application that would help us manage our chatroom in a more efficient style. Being a global channel, it was very hard to do “shift transfers” and knowledge transfers between moderators as the typical nature of a chatroom is the fact that when a word is typed, its posted and its gone after a few seconds – this quickly became a pain point for us trying to maintain a list of offenders to keep an eye out for and have it all maintained in a historical, easily accessible way.

A thought occurred to me. Why not start a “forum” for the moderators to use? The concept of “forums” or discussion boards was new to the Internet – it was the seed of what we call social media today. The concept of having a chat-style discussion be forever hosted online and be available for everyone to view and respond to at anytime from anywhere was extremely well welcomed by the Internet users. I don’t recall what software or service I initially used to set that forum up, but I did – with absolutely no knowledge that the forum I just setup was a tiny little acorn that would one day be the oak tree that is ShiaChat.com.